@C . Music for Empty Spaces

A romantic piano over bath-time sounds, audio pollution and chirping birds, advanced digital constructs and found sounds – the art of Portuguese duo @c is about contrasts, unheard juxtapositions staged so that they make perfect sense as part of a continuum that is better described as a hallucination or a mystical voyage than mere cinema for the ear.

@c consists of Pedro Tudela (b. 1962, artist, musician, stage designer) and Miguel Carvalhais (b. 1974, communication designer, musician). They have been working together under that two-character name for exactly 10 years – their first performance took place in March 2000. They also head the venerable sound art label Crónica. As @c, they have released a dozen records on labels such as Crónica, Sirr, Grain of Sound, ZKM, and now Baskaru. They have collaborated with Aki Onda, Marc Behrens, Gintas K, Gert-Jan Prins, and Paulo Raposo, and they often work on stage with Austrian video artist Lia.

The duo describe their seven-movement opus “Music for Empty Spaces” as a “collage and a diary of sorts, a repository of memories.” The album makes use of recordings made in Aalst, Glasgow, Lisboa, Nagoya, Paris, Porto, São Miguel, and Stirling, as @c was traveling, touring, and collaborating with other musicians (Nuno Aroso, Miquel Bernat, Raymond MacDonald, and Jonathan Uliel appear on the album).

@c’s goal was to transmute these sounds: “Our music is about concrete and musical sounds and their plastic nature when they are digitally (captured and) transformed. How the sounds involve us with an immaterial and invisible space. It is about the number of ways in which a sound can be heard and how it conflicts or dialogues with other sounds.”

Dense Promotions

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RE: Yoshio Machida : Hypernatural #3

Yoshio Machida has been working on this series since 1997. The first volume was self-released in 1999 and had for theme memory in Eastern Asia ; Volume 2, released by Softl Music in 2001, focused on transparency, unconsciousness and invisible existence. “Hypernatural #3″, the last instalment in this triptych, is about oblivion. Machida explains: “Oblivion is characteristic of the correlation between matter and time. Oblivion has a positive aspect: it appears as a natural phenomenon in the passage of time and becomes a factor in creating new worlds. Nature consists of a myriad of different memory-oblivion cycles”.

Born in 1967, Japanese artist Yoshio Machida studied minimalist art. While working for international cooperation, he had the opportunity to travel and make field recordings. Since then, he has been using these field recordings, combining them to the treated sounds of real instruments, including gongs and steel drums (the latter instrument playing a non-negligeable role on “Hypernatural #3″). Machida has performed at music festivals, including ISEA2004 and Maerz Musik. David Toop has introduced his music in his book “Haunted Weather”, and a track from “Hypernatural #2″ was featured in a commercial on French television. He also runs his own Amorfon label.
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Baskaru

E-mail: hello@baskaru.com

Web site: http://www.baskaru.com

Last.FM: http://www.last.fm/label/baskaru

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/baskaru

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M.B + E.D.A – Regolelettroniche

M.B + E.D.A – Regolelettroniche

karu:8, CD (digipak)

4 audio tracks, (p) 2007

Italians Maurizio Bianchi and Emanuela De Angelis have a generation between them, but that does not prevent them from delivering their first collaboration entitled “Regolelettroniche”.

However, to get there, they had to agree on a few rules, alluded to in titles such as “Earthly Principle” and “Cosmic Norms”, and through these “rulelectronics” credited to both of them.

That being said, these rules are left unexplained; listeners can discover them on their own when they experience this drone-based music: soft, quiet, seemingly reiterative yet clearly transformative.

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GoGooo – Long, Lointain

GoGooo – Long, Lointain

karu:9, CD (digipak)

10 audio tracks + 4 video tracks, (p) 2007

Far-away sounds, close to the heart…

Delicately-played instruments whose sounds, once sampled and digitally treated, seem to permeate our ears from a distant world both strange and strangely familiar. And yet, the resulting music is intimate as can be, full of untold and evocative imagery.

Delicately-played instruments whose sounds, once sampled and digitally treated, seem to permeate our ears from a distant world both strange and strangely familiar. And yet, the resulting music is intimate as can be, full of untold and evocative imagery.

GoGooo is Gabriel Hernandez, born in 1979 in Grenoble, France. Gabriel started making music because he wanted to accompany his guitar-playing cousin. Untrained, he turned to the computer, and thus came to life their duo Simagre. Other collaborations ensued with Alain Basso (Sol III) and Daisuke Miyatani (Miyagooo).

“Long, lointain” [Long, far] is GoGooo?s first professional full-length release, following a number of net releases, CDR EPs and compilation appearances. 2007 is a coming-out year for GoGooo, with additional releases on labels such as (1.8)sec Records (Canada), Magic Book (Japan), EKO (France) and his own netlabel Rain Music.

“Long, lointain” features 10 short pieces exerting a fleeting charm, populated with field recordings, found sounds and skeletons of melodies, all delicately arranged to titillate and soothe your ears. This music can be compared to electroacoustic folk for its instrumentation, but is actually unique in style.

Gabriel Hernandez is also a drawing artist, photographer and video artist, and most of these other facets of his art are represented in “Long, lointain”s packaging, including drawings decorating the digipack cover and four short videos.

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Lawrence English : For varying degrees of winter

Lawrence English

For varying degrees of winter

label: Baskaru

ref: Karu:7

players: Lawrence English, Mike Cooper (guitar), Janek Schaefer (electronics), Aki Onda (tapes)

Electronic soundscaping, the atmospheric plays a leading role in the work of this musician, placing us before an electronically created soundscape where the materials present a synthetic nature if the actual relation, spatialization and veiling literally mimic the acoustic experience. A minimal approach to development, spinning around blurred circles, carefully disguised through the presence of impermanent, careful, limen-like overtones. A busy emptiness of pleasant contours, inclined towards horizontal forms of static nature, spatialization featured as a source of variation together with the fading quality of half said things.

Paisaje sonoro electrnico, lo atmosfrico interpreta el papel principal en la obra de este msico, situndonos frente a un paisaje creado electrnicamente en el que los materiales presentan una naturaleza sinttica aunque la relacin, espacializacin y veladuras reales imitan literalmente la experiencia acstica. El planteamiento minimal del desarrollo se articula en torno a crculos desdibujados, cuidadosamente camuflados tras la presencia de armnicos impermanentes de carcter liminal. Un ajetreado vaco de contornos agradables, tendente hacia formas horizontales de naturaleza esttica, aparece junto a la espacializacin que figura a modo de recurso de variacin junto a la naturaleza medio borrosa de cosas dichas a medias.

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